Read about the latest UK political news, views and analysis.
14 min listen
Jeremy Hunt said he would look to cut taxes in the March budget. In the Mail on Sunday, he said he would look to emulate the late Nigel Lawson, who as Margaret Thatcher’s chancellor slashed rates. But Hunt has been promising tax cuts, and hardly delivering, for a while. Will this time be any different? James Heale speaks to Katy Balls and Kate Andrews.
If you thought senior Conservatives giving evidence to the UK Covid inquiry in London was rough then you should watch the footage now emerging from Edinburgh, where the Inquiry’s lawyers have moved to take evidence. It’s a bloodbath. Former first minister Nicola Sturgeon and current first minister Humza Yousaf are yet to even take the stand. But already the sessions have revealed a Scottish SNP government embroiled in secrecy, cover-up and the politicisation of a deadly pandemic in the interests of furthering the cause of independence. The latest revelations are startling. On Friday morning, the inquiry established that Sturgeon and other senior Scottish government officials had deliberately deleted WhatsApp messages
Keir Starmer is drawing up his battle-lines for the next election. First, he came for the public schools, pledging to whack VAT on school fees. Now he’s going for the traditionalist wing of National Trust members. In a speech today, he accuses the Tories of ‘waging a war’ on charities and civic society. He claims the Conservatives have denigrated the National Trust by accusing it of pursuing a ‘woke’ agenda: ‘In its desperation to cling onto power, at all costs, the Tory party is trying to find woke agendas in the very civic institutions they once regarded with respect.’ The National Trust was once a byword for high-minded thought So
Poor old BBC. It’s been another torrid year for the Corporation after being embarrassed by Gary Lineker, lambasted over Richard Sharp and humiliated over various Hamas howlers. And now, even the mild-mannered Culture Secretary is having a pop at them. Lucy Frazer – never the most natural of culture warriors – was out on the airwaves this morning, discussing plans to give Ofcom more of a role in regulating the Corporation’s content. Frazer warned on Times Radio that audiences now increasingly feel that the Beeb is failing to be impartial. She said that ‘there was a perception among audiences’ of a problem, after complaints about bias jumped by more than
The farmers of France are mobilising. Their anger will be an early test for Gabriel Attal; the countryside is unknown territory for the new prime minister, a young man raised in the affluent suburbs of Paris, like the majority of Emmanuel Macron’s government. The first dissent was on Friday in the south-west of France, in and around Toulouse. On the motorway linking the city to the Atlantic coast, the farmers erected a barricade with bales of hay that is still in place three days later. Their largest union, the FNSEA, has warned this is likely to be the first of many such actions. Their president, Arnaud Rousseau told the government: ‘What
A century ago today, the first ever Labour government was formed. Yet even many Labour members will probably be ignorant of the anniversary. To be fair, most historians of the party (this one included) have overlooked the government in favour of the superficially more consequential post-war administrations, especially that of 1945. After all, the 1924 government lasted just nine months and its legislative successes were few. Formed after the inconclusive December 1923 general election left the Conservatives unable to command a Commons majority, as his was the second largest party and enjoying qualified Liberal support, Labour leader Ramsay MacDonald stepped in. Few believed he would last long in Number 10:
So. Farewell then Ron DeSantis. The Florida Governor tonight bowed to the inevitable and announced he was dropping out of the race to be the Republican nominee for the White House. In a four-and-a-half-minute long address on Twitter/X, DeSantis declared that ‘it’s clear to me that a majority of Republican primary voters want to give Donald Trump another chance’. ‘Following our second-place finish in Iowa, we’ve prayed and deliberated on the way forward,’ he said. ‘If there was anything I could do to produce a favourable outcome, more campaign stops, more interviews, I would do it. But I can’t ask our supporters to volunteer their time and donate their resources.
Ron DeSantis’ political action committee is called ‘Never Back Down.’ Well, he just did. A week ago, he said of Trump: ‘You can be the most worthless Republican in America, but if you kiss the ring he’ll say you’re wonderful.’ Well, he just endorsed Trump for the presidency in 2024. This morning, DeSantis campaign staff batted away speculation that he would imminently quit, saying ‘with 100 per cent certainty’ that DeSantis would fight on to the South Carolina primary next month and beyond. Hours later, Ron proved them wrong. ‘While this campaign has ended, the mission continues,’ he said in a video. Bowing to the seemingly inevitable, he endorsed Donald Trump
On a call with Joe Biden this weekend, the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu reiterated Israel’s demand for security control over Gaza once Hamas has been destroyed, and said that this was incompatible with Palestinian sovereignty. Speaking to Laura Kuenssberg, UK Defence Secretary Grant Shapps described Netanyahu’s views as ‘disappointing’, and said that the two-state solution is the only option. However, he described Israel’s government as a ‘rainbow coalition’, and said it was important to distinguish between the view’s of Netanyahu as an individual, and the UK’s support for Israel as a country. Is the UK preparing for war with Russia? Nato military chief Admiral Rob Bauer claimed this week
More tax cuts are on their way, according to the both the Prime Minister and Chancellor who have written comment pieces in The Sun on Sunday and The Mail on Sunday respectively to indicate their intentions ahead of the upcoming March Budget. This is interesting because their published plans suggest a rise in taxes, to levels not seen in peacetime history. Might they be about to change their mind? The Prime Minister used an outing to Hampshire to give the green light to tax cuts at ‘future events when we can responsibly do so’, while the Chancellor used his trip to Davos to say that a lower tax burden was ‘the direction of travel we would
The first and most important principle of war for any military campaign is the selection and maintenance of ‘the aim’. The aim must be clear and unambiguous, so that everyone, from the most senior general to the private soldier, understands what is trying to be achieved. Unfortunately for the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) the aim of the war in Gaza – the annihilation of Hamas – is neither clear, unambiguous nor achievable. Now the IDF – or more accurately, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – is facing the very real risk of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. When Joe Biden, the US president, spoke to Israelis during a brief
The row that has erupted at Katharine Birbalsingh’s Michaela school in north London highlights the difference in how Britain and France confront Islamic conservatism in education and wider society. Birbalsingh has displayed courage in imposing a blanket ban on all ritual prayer in the school, but nonetheless in France such displays of religiosity have been outlawed for more than a century. Initially this was to curb the influence of the Catholic church, but in recent decades it has been Islam attempting to undermine the secularism of French schools. It began in the autumn of 1989 when three teenage girls arrived at their school in a suburb of northern Paris wearing headscarves.
‘Spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison,’ C.S. Lewis famously said. In western countries, organised religion has been declining for the last two centuries; Friedrich Nietzsche even declared that ‘God is dead’. Does the decline and fall of religion have political consequences? Can totalitarian ideology grow in the void left by religion? To find the answer, it’s worth looking to 1930s Germany. Did shallow Christianity – a lack of deep-rooted Christian beliefs – make Germans more susceptible to the Nazi party’s message during the years of Adolf Hitler’s rise to power? In the less-than-fertile Christian soils of Germany, there was room
Today is the centenary of Vladimir Lenin’s death. His Moscow funeral was marked by official communist solemnity, as if a messiah had come and departed. Trams and buses were halted and boats were tied to mooring posts. Factory whistles were sounded at the moment when his corpse, not yet embalmed for the mausoleum that stands today on Red Square, was lowered into the ice-cold earth. Those who refrained from lamenting his passing joked that people who’d had to applaud him in life were whistling when he died. Vladimir Putin does not worship at Lenin’s shrine or memory. He holds him culpable for the 1922 constitutional settlement that gave ‘artificial’ recognition to
18 min listen
For this special Americano podcast, Freddy Gray is in New Hampshire with the Spectator US team, Matt McDonald and Zach Christenson covering the chilly primaries. Are both Ron De Santis and Nikki Haley’s defeat a foregone conclusion?
Argentine President Javier Milei’s recent speech, to the World Economic Forum in Davos, has caused a stir for several reasons. First, it was someone saying something interesting at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Also, it was someone being positive about capitalism and enterprise in a lucid, educated way. Agree with Milei or not, he is clearly not a dunce, even if he is possibly overfond of chainsaws. Now there is another cause to be animated by the speech, a reason that dwarfs all the others. Indeed, the ramifications are so immense they can be difficult to extrapolate: this could, literally, be a civilisational game-changer. I’m talking about the translation
18 min listen
This week: Spectator editor Fraser Nelson on why the Emirati ownership of the magazine matters (00:30), Robert Hardman on the time the King could have poisoned Rishi Sunak (06:24) and Michael Simmons on why sobriety isn’t worth it (13:02).
13 min listen
As problems in the Middle East and war on the continent dominate the headlines, David Cameron has been front and centre in his new role as foreign secretary. Is his experience coming in handy? Is he Rishi’s ‘prime minister abroad’? Katy Balls speaks to Craig Oliver, director of communications at No. 10 during the Cameron era, and Sophia Gaston, head of foreign policy at Policy Exchange. Produced by Max Jeffery and Oscar Edmondson.
The March presidential elections in Russia will, of course, be a stage-managed farce, but that doesn’t mean that real politics has been entirely extinguished. It offers a narrow window of opportunity for the opposition to try and connect with the Russian people – so the Kremlin is doing its best to muzzle them. On the third anniversary of his return to Russia on Wednesday, opposition leader Alexei Navalny issued a statement on X (via his lawyers, his only connection with the outside world) intended to bolster his supporters’ morale. He returned from Germany in 2021 following a poisoning attempt that saw government agents lace his underwear with Novichok. Answering the
If you attend almost any public meeting or event in Australia these days, you’ll be greeted – some would say confronted – by a mandatory statement before it starts. Even the nation’s parliament now starts the day with this statement, ahead of the centuries-old ritual of reciting the Lord’s Prayer. Known as the Acknowledgment of Country, it is a now all-pervasive ritual of Australian life. Generally, it uses these words: A whole industry has sprung up around Aborigines being hired by event organisers to stage Welcomes to Country We meet here today on the lands of the traditional owners, the (Aboriginal tribe) people, and acknowledge their elders past and present.